Valkyria Chronicles II

[Kevadu]

Amazon has completely failed me this time.  I got an email this morning saying it wouldn't even ship until September 8th.  This is when I had it preordered...so I went to Gamestop and picked up a copy.

There is some kind of pre-PAX IGN/PS Blog meet and greet tonight that mentioned the possibility of some VC2 multiplayer action.  Since I haven't even cracked the shrinkwrap yet I obviously haven't tried single-player so I'm not exactly sure how well that will work out but I think I will try to attend.

[Lazlowe1984]

I haven't picked this up yet.My PSP screen cracked last week :(

[Farron]

God, if this isn't the worst time of the year to break your PSP. With Valkyria Chronicles 2, Persona 3 and Birth by Sleep on the top of my head.

I'm at the beginning of VCII, and I'm enjoying it a lot. The only thing I'm a little sad about is that there are no snipers. Sure, I understand the battle stages are smaller, so a sniper may not do that much of a difference but still.

[TurnBasedDude]

There are actually, but are gained differently. The starting classes can later get advanced ones and branch out to multiple ones. Snipers are part of the scout tier now, but I did not get it myself yet.

[ZeronHitaro]

Just started it this afternoon and have pretty much played non-stop for about 8 hours. Pretty good game, won't have any problems seeing this one through to the end. It's a fairly flawed title though. I swear over half the playable cast so far is pretty much dumb as rock with the cliche factor cranked up so high I can't even take the story slightly seriously. Which is a shame because it has potential to be so. Not to metion the very first 10 minutes of the story made me miss the days of the silent protagonist. Not so much for the VA work as his thought process is comepletely insane and nonsensical in a bad way.

Although speaking of "dumb as rock" the AI in this game ranges from decent to outright pitiful. I just got done beating a map where one Shocktrooper ran forward, fired, ended his turn; then Shocktrooper #2 came up directly behind him, fired at me, and completely wasted all his ammo critically hitting his friend...

I haven't seen such a bad case of AI friendly fire since FFT's black mages. With decent AI programming this could've been a nicely challenging SRPG right up there with Wild Arms XF. As is though...not so much.

[Cyril]

Amazon has completely failed me this time.  I got an email this morning saying it wouldn't even ship until September 8th.  This is when I had it preordered...so I went to Gamestop and picked up a copy.

There is some kind of pre-PAX IGN/PS Blog meet and greet tonight that mentioned the possibility of some VC2 multiplayer action.  Since I haven't even cracked the shrinkwrap yet I obviously haven't tried single-player so I'm not exactly sure how well that will work out but I think I will try to attend.

A bit late here, but I actually got this "delayed shipping" message as well.  Then, about 6 hours later, I received my shipping confirmation.

[Kevadu]

A bit late here, but I actually got this "delayed shipping" message as well.  Then, about 6 hours later, I received my shipping confirmation.

Interesting.  Must be from all the people like me who cancelled their orders after seeing that ;)

I actually have two copies of the game now.  I bought one this morning and I just won one at the pre-PAX IGN/PS Blog even tonight!  They were having a competition to get the best time on a certain mission in the game and I won it, which was pretty fun.

[ZeronHitaro]

Am I the only one really irritated by the manner in which they handle non-video cutscenes? For a current gen handheld the production value is really low. Either they ran out of disk space or got incredibly lazy. :-/ The characters all look like cardboard cut-outs and bounce around the edges of the screen in the exact same manners hand puppets do at a children's puppet theater production...well...almost exact. The puppets are actually better because they at least have limited arm movement to express body language.

I know it's kinda similar to the "Tales" series in how the interactions/story is told but at least in the Tales games the character's faces were animated while they were talking to express emotion properly. Unlike here where it seems every character only has about 3-4 emotional stills while typically only cycling between 2 of them. (Speaking of which what's up with the main character's "tough guy" pose? XD He looks like he's filming for a Captain Morgan commercial...)

I dunno, maybe I'm just nitpicking but seeing these cutouts wave and twitch around on screen as if they were on a Cloverfield set every time they need to indicate more than basic motion kinda gives me a headache and causes irritation. ~.~;

[Kevadu]

Telling dialogue with 2D stills is certainly nothing new in Japanese games, but I'll agree with you that the ones in VC2 seem particularly poor.  I think it's a combination of the limited number of (sometimes very exaggerated) poses, poor transitions, and lack of animation.  It's a shame because VC1 had similarly styled sequences only using fully animated 3D models which looked great.  Is disc space the culprit?  I have a hard time believing that.  Once you have the 3D models themselves it doesn't require much space to animate them.  They weren't using pre-rendered movies.  Maybe it's because they were worried that the 3D models on the PSP wouldn't look nearly as good up close and personal so they went with the 2D stills to show the characters in more detail.

At least the gameplay is solid.

[ZeronHitaro]

Agreed. Despite certain irritations about the gameplay it's quite enjoyable. Heck I might even replay it later this year once I beat it for no other reason than to do it all again. Certain parts of the battle system seem wonky to  me though. Shield Classes are absolutely godly. I can pretty much clear half a map of infantry units with one Shield user alone. But fighting against them...dear lord. X-x;

The Draken Shield Class girl's (forget her name) character map I fought (with a party of level 3's and 4's...probably a mistake) and beat after 16 turns...what took so long? 2-4 (depending on the turn)  constantly respawning Fencers. It's insane how many Command Tokens you have to spend to kill these guys. @_@; They take at least 2 CT for one (one to make them turn and another for someone to rear head shot them). Finally I just decided to spam Lancer classes so I could make progress instead of hit and running and about 15+ rockets later I broke through. ~.~;

[Dizzy]

Started it up and did a few missions. I'm enjoying it a lot, so far. Any complaints about the game are just trivial nitpicks.

I might just put it off 'til my family's road-trip though. I'm going to need something to do in the van. :P

[Lazlowe1984]

God, if this isn't the worst time of the year to break your PSP. With Valkyria Chronicles 2, Persona 3 and Birth by Sleep on the top of my head.

I'm at the beginning of VCII, and I'm enjoying it a lot. The only thing I'm a little sad about is that there are no snipers. Sure, I understand the battle stages are smaller, so a sniper may not do that much of a difference but still.

An RPG addict like myself misses out on the 3 biggest RPGs of the season right at the last minute...

Somebody up there hates me

[insertnamehere]

God, if this isn't the worst time of the year to break your PSP. With Valkyria Chronicles 2, Persona 3 and Birth by Sleep on the top of my head.

I'm at the beginning of VCII, and I'm enjoying it a lot. The only thing I'm a little sad about is that there are no snipers. Sure, I understand the battle stages are smaller, so a sniper may not do that much of a difference but still.

An RPG addict like myself misses out on the 3 biggest RPGs of the season right at the last minute...

Somebody up there hates me

don't forget ys seven
and so far, this game is good except a few nitpicks:
the "mini-cutscenes" with friends seems to have little to no purpose
does it maybe have a thingy that affects something in battle?
most characters are too one-dimensional (so far)
the time system is confusing and it appears to make some events go away
it also doesn't seem to have any clock to show me the amount of time is left in a day
or maybe that's just something I made up subconciously 'cause it confused me
in battle, AP seems to be only limited to moving instead of any actions and this battle system is reminiscent of Sakura Taisen except this gauge depletes permanently even while backtracking.
it makes me angry that sega chose not to localize those games

[ShadowLaguna]

I bought it today.

Put in about an hour, so far. I already have that 'Persona' impression. I also have a feeling that I'm gonna enjoy this one.

[Kevadu]

I am completely addicted to this game.  I decided to play just a little bit before going to sleep last night and before I knew it, it was 3am...

I do have one major critcism about the combat, and that's the fact that it's too easy to take enemy camps and then start spawning new units from them.  In the first game that could be a valid tactic, but it was not without risks.  You had to spend a CP to request the reinforcements, wait a turn, and then you got to use that unit (if you spend additional CP to command it).  If the enemy retook the camp before the turn was up your CP was just wasted.  In VC2 if you control a camp you can bring in new units and start commanding them right away by only spending a single CP.  With the way the maps are broken into pieces it's sort of necessary so I understand the decision, but in practice this means that I start every single mission with the minimum number of troops I think I can get away with under the assumption that I'll just grab camps and insta-spawn new troops further into enemy lines.  It also means that there is essentially no penalty for withdrawing a troop (if they're near a camp, anyway) so you can cycle through troops as they get wounded, and they heal super-fast if they're not deployed.